I. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to antenna-array processing and ad-hoc networking, and particularly to providing cooperative signal processing between a plurality of wireless terminal devices, such as to improve network access.
II. Description of the Related Art
Wireless data service is an emerging market with high growth potential. However, market growth requires higher bandwidth and better coverage than cellular technologies can provide. Furthermore, state-of-the-art wireless network technologies are mainly focused on the server side, rather than using mobile wireless terminals to extend the network infrastructure.
A peer-to-peer mode of communication is expected to offer distinct performance benefits over the conventional cellular model, including better spatial-reuse characteristics, lower energy consumption, and extended coverage areas. The key advantage of the peer-to-peer network model is the increase in spatial reuse due to its short-range transmissions. Although peer-to-peer networking shows some promise, there are significant drawbacks that prevent conventional peer-to-peer networks from being a technically and commercially viable solution.
Recent analyses of multi-hop networks compared to cellular networks have indicated that the spatial reuse improvement in the peer-to-peer network model does not translate into greater throughput. Rather, the throughput is lower than that observed in the cellular network model. This observation is explained in three parts:                Multi-hop Routes: Although the spatial reuse is increased, since a flow traverses multiple hops in the peer-to-peer network model, the end-to-end throughput of a flow, while directly proportional to the spatial reuse, is also inversely proportional to the hop-length. Moreover, since the expected hop-length in a dense network is of the order of O(√n), a tighter bound on the expected per-flow throughput is O(1/√n). While this bound is still higher than that of the dense cellular network model (O(1/n)), the following two reasons degrade the performance even more.        Base-Station Bottleneck: The degree of spatial reuse and expected per-flow throughput of the peer-to-peer network model is valid for a network where all flows have destinations within the same cell. In this case, the base station is the destination for all flows (e.g., it is the destination of the wireless path). Thus, any increase in spatial reuse cannot be fully realized as the channel around the base-station becomes a bottleneck and has to be shared by all the flows in the network. Note that this is not an artifact of the single-channel model. As long as the resources around the base-station are shared by all the flows in the network (irrespective of the number of channels), the performance of the flows will be limited to that of the cellular network model.        Protocol Inefficiencies: The protocols used in the cellular network model are both simple and centralized, with the base station performing most of the coordination. Cellular protocols operate over a single hop, leading to very minimal performance degradation because of protocol inefficiencies. However, in the peer-to-peer network model, the protocols (such as IEEE 802.11 and DSR) are distributed, and they operate over multiple hops. The multi-hop path results in more variation in latency, losses, and throughput for TCP. These inefficiencies (which arise because of the distributed operation of the medium access and routing layers) and the multi-hop operation at the transport layer translate into a further degraded performance.        
Similarly, antenna-array processing has demonstrated impressive improvements in coverage and spatial reuse. Array-processing systems typically employ multiple antennas at base stations to focus transmitted and received radio energy and thereby improve signal quality. In cellular communications, improvements in signal quality lead to system-wide benefits with respect to coverage, service quality and, ultimately, the economics of cellular service. Furthermore, the implementation of antenna arrays at both ends of a communication link can greatly increase the capacity and performance benefits via Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) processing. However, power, cost, and size constraints typically make the implementation of antenna arrays on mobile wireless terminals, such as handsets or PDAs, impractical.
In cooperative diversity, each wireless terminal is assigned an orthogonal signal space relative to the other terminals for transmission and/or reception. In particular, both multiplexing and multiple access in cooperative diversity are orthogonal. In antenna-array processing, either or both multiplexing and multiple access are non-orthogonal. Specifically, some form of interference cancellation is required to separate signals in an array-processing system because transmitted and/or received information occupies the same signal space.
Applications and embodiments of the present invention relate to ad-hoc networking and antenna-array processing. Embodiments of the invention may address general and/or specific needs that are not adequately serviced by the prior art, including (but not limited to) improving network access (e.g., enhancing range, coverage, throughput, connectivity, and/or reliability). Applications of certain embodiments of the invention may include tactical, emergency response, and consumer wireless communications. Due to the breadth and scope of the present invention, embodiments of the invention may be provided for achieving a large number of objectives and applications, which are too numerous to list herein. Therefore, only some of the objects and advantages of specific embodiments of the present invention are discussed in the Summary and in the Preferred Embodiments.